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Event Information

Date and Time

Location

Keller Gallery

Keller Gallery, Room 7-408

77, Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, MA 02139

Event description

Description

Climate Changed: After Models?

What is the feedback process between climate models and design? Since the development of the first general circulation model in the 1960s, computationally-driven models have served and continue to serve as the primary mode of understanding, representing, analyzing, communicating and shifting the world in a climate changed. Climate Changed: After Models? looks at the common language and use of modeling between design and the sciences.

Climate Changed: After Models? positions a range of historical and future speculative modeling proposals together from the 1960s onward to explore how design has responded to climate-related models and the reality of climate change. The historical projects from the 1960s to the 1990s specifically focus on how designers, architects, engineers, consumers, and policy makers have understood the post-1960s moment as a period of changing scientific awareness around the agency of climate-related models. Coupled with a growing connection between environmental change and the built environment various changes on the ground occurred including: shifting consumer expectations, policy implementation, and projects built under the new paradigm. We ask: What happens after and between models in these projects?

Also included are speculative proposals for the future of the Greater Boston area from the Climate Changed Ideas Competition. In these proposals, current students and thinkers in design and the sciences use climate models and data to inform site-specific design interventions and climate-related planning strategies to help illuminate the agency of models today.

By articulating the historical, present, and future role of climate-related models and illustrating their use in policy formulation and implementation, architectural practice, the protection and utilization of natural systems, and the forward-thinking planning and construction of cities, this exhibits hopes to bring multiple disciplines in conversation to discuss how the earth’s climate is understood through modeling and how this informs on-the-ground practices.